I SEE CHEATERS! So Yeah, My Fiancé's Wedding Went Up In Flames! novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Room 410

Kelsey dares Lainey to call off the wedding, and Lainey pulls the hotel's hallway footage with her mother at 2 a.m. instead, until the best man walks in on the frozen frame.

I had told exactly one person in my whole life about the strings.

I told Rafferty on our third date, at a diner on Frankford Avenue, at one in the morning.

He laughed, and then he saw my face and stopped laughing.

"Okay," he'd said. "Then look at me. What do you see?"

"Nothing," I'd said. "You're clean."

He'd grinned.

Now Kelsey leaned against the bathroom door of my mother's suite and fixed her lipstick in my mirror.

"He tells me everything, Lainey," she said. "He thinks it's cute. Your little red strings."

My hands were wet. I didn't remember turning on the tap.

"How long?" I asked.

"Does it matter?" She capped the lipstick. "Call it off, then. Go out there and tell everybody why."

She smiled at me in the glass.

"Tell them you can see a string on his head. Tell them it goes to me. See who believes you."

There was music through the door, and Sinead screaming the words to something.

I turned off the tap and dried my hands on the little towel with the hotel's crest.

My mother's hotel. My mother's towels.

"Noon," I said.

Kelsey blinked. "What?"

"Hair and makeup start at noon in the bridal suite. Don't be late. You're carrying my flowers."

I unlocked the door and walked past her.

Her string was still bright red above her head, and it ran out into the party to Rafferty.

He was doing a shot with Sinead's boyfriend.

He raised it to me. I raised my glass back.

At two in the morning, I went down to the security office behind the front desk in a hoodie and my bachelorette sash.

The night guard had worked for my mother for nine years. He looked at the sash and then at my face.

"I need Thursday night," I said. "Fourth floor. The hallway outside 410."

Rafferty had stayed in 410 on Thursday after the rehearsal dinner. It was easier than driving back to Bryn Mawr.

The guard didn't ask why. He pulled a chair out for me.

He scrolled through the footage on fast forward, and the hallway's lights flickered in grey.

At 1:52 a.m., a woman walked into the frame from the elevator.

She had long platinum hair and she was carrying her shoes.

She knocked on 410.

The door opened, and Rafferty stood there in his boxers. He pulled her in by the front of her dress.

The guard sucked in a breath and didn't say anything.

"Keep going," I said.

At 6:10 a.m., the door opened again. Kelsey came out with her hair wet from his shower.

She looked up and down the hall, and then she looked right at the camera.

She smiled at it.

I sat back in the chair.

Behind me, the office door banged open.

My mother stood there in her silk robe and her reading glasses, with her phone in her hand.

"He called me," she said, and nodded at the guard. "He said you looked like death. What is it?"

I pointed at the screen.

Joan Corbett had run this hotel for eleven years.

She'd seen a lot of things on a lot of screens.

She watched the clip once, all the way through, and took off her glasses.

"I'm going to throw him in the river," she said. "I'm going to drive him to the Delaware and push him off the dock."

"Mom."

"Then I'm going to cancel the flowers, the band, the cake, everything. You hear me? Everything."

"No," I said.

She stared at me.

There was one dark string over her head, old and thin, and it ran east toward New Jersey, toward my father's house in Cherry Hill.

She'd never had another one. Not in eight years.

"He wants your hotel," I said.

Mom went quiet.

At our engagement party a year ago, she'd stood up on a chair and announced her wedding gift. Half of the Bellamy, to both of us.

The papers were signed and sitting in her safe. She was going to hand them to us at the toast.

"He's getting married tomorrow for half of this building," I said. "So let him walk up the aisle for it."

Mom looked at the frozen frame of Kelsey smiling at the camera.

"And then what?"

"Then everybody he invited gets to see what he does at two in the morning."

She thought about it the way she thought about bad reviews, with her mouth flat.

"One condition," she said. "I walk you down that aisle. Not your father."

"Deal."

She put her glasses back on and squeezed my shoulder hard enough to hurt.

The guard cleared his throat.

I turned around.

Cal Sheridan was standing in the open doorway, Rafferty's older brother, the best man.

He still had on his party shirt, and his sleeves were pushed up over the burn scar on his arm.

He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the screen, at Kelsey and room 410.

"How long have you known?" he said.

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